ASUS ROG Ally In-Depth Review

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Retro Game core today we're going to review the Asus Rog alley I'm super excited about this one because I think it's the first viable alternative to the steam deck now there have been a bunch of handheld PCS released over the past couple years and I've reviewed most of them here on this channel but this one's special and that mostly has to do with the price and of course we'll talk about that here in a minute in this video here we're going to mostly focus on the controls and performance we'll talk about other things like battery life as well and I have a couple other videos planned for example I want to do a dedicated steam deck versus Rog Ally video and then also I want to try out the XG mobile external GPU solution that they have as well and that one I think is going to be really interesting and so be on the lookout for that either way let's go ahead and dive right into the reveal [Music] okay let's go ahead and get started with specs now there's a lot to unpack here so I'm just going to go over the highlights to start we are using a custom Apu from AMD and we have two options the Z1 and the Z1 extreme both of these are 7000 series chips that have been customized for handheld devices and they are using the new rdna3 integrated Graphics both models are going to come with 16 gigabytes of lpddr5 RAM clocked at 6400 megahertz and they're both going to use 2230 solid state drives the Z1 will have 256 gigs whereas the extreme will have 512. now the display here is pretty unique it's 7 inches 1080p with a 16x9 aspect ratio but this is the first handheld I've seen with 120 hertz refresh rate additionally it has a 40 watt hour battery so about the same as the steam deck but it can charge it up to 65 watts in terms of connectivity we have Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 and it has a single USBC Port rated for 3.2 gen 2. and finally this device comes with Windows 11 home and a couple other nice features like a Micro SD card slot a headphone jack as well as gyroscopic controls now I wasn't able to get the price ahead of time for the Z1 model I think that'll be announced today but I was able to confirm that the Z1 extreme which is the one that I reviewed here today is going to retail for 6.99 and pre-order should be starting today and the device itself will be available worldwide on June 13th and the company should be making an announcement about all this stuff here today as well regardless I think that 6.99 for the high spec model is a really good deal and honestly after looking at all the numbers I was expecting it to be closer to a thousand instead we're talking about a device whose high-spec model is only fifty dollars more than the high spec model of the steam deck okay next up let's do a quick unboxing the Box itself is relatively small and you can see the device is just really crammed right inside now the packaging is pretty Bare Bones underneath you will find the 65 watt charging brick and then on the right you're going to find a quick start guide and then some safety paperwork and that's about it now on the lid itself it actually has a little stand so let's go ahead and pull this one out now first things first this is just made out of paper so it's not like a high quality stand but all the same it'll work in a pinch if you need to prop the device up now they also send over this charging dock for me to review this one is also 65 Watts but a little bit smaller than the one that comes with the device itself it also comes with a six foot braided USBC cable which is really high quality and the brick itself is pretty neat too you would plug the device in here to the USBC and then it has an HDMI output as well as a USB 2.0 interface and if you plug something into this it'll interface directly with the device as well so overall it's a very compact solution if you want to have additional functionality and so here's a quick setup I have a cable plugged into the device and then on the other end it's plugged into the charging brick from there I have that brick hooked up to HDMI with the monitor here and then with that additional usb-c Port I've used a 2.4 wireless dongle and so now I'm connecting directly to this 8-bit doe controller with the device and HDMI all from that one little brick so if you're looking for a very compact docking solution this might work for you and another thing to note when you use is a 65 watt charging brick like the one that comes with it or this one here the device will actually recognize that it's getting the full 65 watts and from there it's going to increase the power profile on the device itself so you can get better gameplay and so for example with this game it automatically gave it the highest power profile and so I was getting 120 frames per second solid and that's going to be handy if you plan on going back and forth between handheld and docked mode so now let's actually take a look at the device itself First Impressions here it has a very squarish look to it but I also like the fact that all the controls are in the upper half of the device that does make things a lot easier to access and feels very comfortable overall and so in this segment here let's go ahead and take a look at all the different controls and functionality and the first thing I want to talk about are these two function buttons here on the back now within their software you can basically map these keys to anything you'd like for example you could have them mimic any other button on the controller but then they also have some action Keys things like showing the keyboard or the desktop Additionally you could set these up to be a keyboard key or something on the number pad or you could even have it mimic a mouse click if you'd like and by default they have it set up as what they call a secondary function and they explain this in the quick start guide but basically what you do is you press one of these buttons and then a different button to do some action so for example if I press that key and then press up it's going to bring the keyboard up or if I press the button and left it'll show the desktop so that's kind of neat because you're not just limited to one action per button next let's talk about the quality of the plastic itself it has a smooth texture here on the front although the far end right here has a little bit of a ribbed grippiness to it it's pretty nice and then on the back we have this diamond shaped texture and this feels really good too in fact it reminds me of an Xbox series controller overall I'm a fan of the plastic texture it resists fingerprints and also has just a nice quality to it now let's take a look at the front we're going to start with the analog sticks first thing you may be wondering is whether or not they are Hall sensors and they are not but I think they feel very good they remind me a lot of a console controller so I think overall in terms of just resistance and feel yeah it's really good Additionally you can see around the rim they do have some RGB lighting and this is also something that you can adjust within the settings by default it's going to be set to this rainbow function right here which is what I actually prefer and in the settings here you can do things like adjusting the brightness and the speed and you can also change the effect for example if you wanted to cycle through specific colors or if you wanted to just have it one static color you can do all that stuff right here but for me personally I kept it on the default rainbow either way yes even though they're not Hall sensors I think these are very good sticks and I also like the grippiness of the cap that they're using right here and it is also nice and concave and finally they do click down for L3 and R3 and so yes I would say these are very good analog sticks overall now let's move over to the d-pad this was something I was a little bit worried about because a circular d-pad like this has a lot of opportunity to be terrible and I have to say that the feel of the d-pad is actually better than I was expecting it has a soft clickiness to it but also has a good amount of travel and accuracy as well and so I do feel it's pretty easy to both get the compass directions as well as the diagonals too I know a lot of people were worried it was going to feel like an Xbox 360 d-pad which by the way has a very mushy feeling to it and just kind of slides around and thankfully the Rog Ally one is not like this at all in fact I would say it's very similar to the d-pad found on the Xbox series controller now the Xbox One is a lot louder and clickier but other than that it's kind of a similar feeling and so if you do like that feeling of accuracy with the Xbox series controller it is pretty similar here on the Rog Ally just bear in mind it has a softer click to it so it's not going to be loud like that but also not quite as clicky and accurate now when it comes to actual gameplay with fighting games it seems very easy to do rolling moves and so I would say this is a d-pad that is both hadoukenable and shoryukenable it also works really well with d-pad games that have an eight-way direction to them so something like Legend of Zelda Minish Camp is going to feel really good however I did find the d-pad does have a tendency to give false diagonals for example here with contra if we press down on the d-pad and then just wiggle it a little bit left or right it'll move the character and this is called the Contra test and I would say it does fail this test right here now I would say this game is still playable if I want to hit a diagonal I can but I do have to be pretty deliberate when I want to press down and not move at an angle so in a nutshell if you are sensitive to false diagonals you probably aren't going to like this experience for other platforming games that require a precise input like Celeste I found it to be perfectly playable and so in the end I do think this is a pretty good d-pad it's probably not the best in the world especially if you're sensitive to false diagonals for me personally I found it to be just fine and really in the end it was better than I was expecting it to be and it'll work just fine with a lot of modern games okay moving on we have two different buttons up here on the top as well as a mic input the top one is going to function as a select button and the bottom one opens up what they call the command center so let's talk about that real quick this is basically going to be a quick menu for a lot of different functions you may want to have while playing a game for example you can adjust the brightness but probably most importantly is the power profile and the company has made three different profiles for this device and they are called Silent performance and turbo and you can also see the wattages here on the screen and we're going to alternate between these when we do some gameplay testing either way to change these out all you have to do is just tap on the button here some of the other options we have within here is to toggle between different controller profiles and we can also adjust the windows resolution and refresh rate here on the Fly and the toggles here are 720p and 1080p and then 60 hertz and 120 and then finally we have the ability to set up things like the frames per second limiter as well as turning on AMD rsr and then finally we have a real-time monitor this will give you a battery readout as well as your wattage which is really helpful and I do want to note that the command center functions are all mappable within the system options as well so he can move these around or add additional controls right here and another thing to note is that when actually in a game these functions don't really work as well as I would like for example swapping between the performance modes can often take a long time and sometimes it'll just crash the command center altogether and so hopefully this is a software bug that they can fix over time but at least right now it was pretty buggy when I was testing it okay and finally on the left side we have one of our two front-facing stereo speakers and I really like the placement here because there's no opportunity for me to actually cover up the speaker so the sound is going to be nice and clear and while we're at it let's go ahead and do a sound test [Music] overall I would say here in this untreated room the sound quality is exceptionally good and we'll spend more time looking into this when I do my steam deck comparison video sometime in the future now let's move over to the right side up top we have a start button and below that opens up what they call the Armory crate and this does a couple different things number one it's a game launcher which will automatically find your games and then put them right here and so if you have a bunch of different gaming services this will come in really handy and additionally we can tap over to get to the settings tab that I've been showing earlier in addition to the stuff we already talked about this is where you can make your different controller profiles and then also you can make some adjustments to the components themselves for example with the analog sticks you can adjust the dead zone as well as the range and same thing with the hall sensor triggers and then finally you can adjust the haptic feedback personally I actually like it on the default 100 setting these feel really nice and then next let's talk about the face buttons now these have a flatter profile similar to what you would find on like a PS5 controller and they have a similar feel to that as well they're a rubber membrane connection and they have a good amount of travel to them too and they stick out a little bit from the case too even when pressed down fully and so overall when it comes to just pressing on these buttons yeah it feels very nice and professional and these have a typical Xbox AB XY layout the only other comment I have about these face buttons is that they have a little bit too much play to them that means that the buttons wobble just a little bit in their shell and it's not a huge amount of play I would say it's just a little bit more than you can find on an Xbox controller but as a result when you try to press down on the button and you're not at a perfect straight down position it does come in at a little bit of an angle and that can feel a little bit weird especially if you're going to be playing a game like Super Mario World where you press down on one button and then press the other in this kind of scenario it gives the buttons a kind of clacky feel and it just doesn't feel quite as precise and accurate as it could these are by no means bad buttons I would call them good but I wouldn't necessarily call them great or exceptional regardless when it came to playing a game other than something where I was pressing multiple buttons I didn't even notice it at all okay next let's take a look at the top and the shoulder and Trigger buttons first thing I noticed is they have this nice grippy texture to them and I really like that here the shoulder buttons themselves have a nice soft clickiness to them and very shallow travel that means they're going to be very easy to press down on and yeah they feel really good the triggers are also very good these are Hall sensor and feel very accurate and they do angle down into kind of sharp angle but all the same when actually using them it feels very comfortable I think the amount of travel we have right here and the angle of the swoop of the trigger button itself is just about perfect initially when I saw the triangle shape design right here I thought it was going to be a little bit sharp at the edge but it turns out they're just fine like they're absolutely comfortable I have no issues with the triggers either and accessing the shoulders and triggers also is very easy to do and so now that we've talked about each of the individual buttons let's talk about the actual feel of the device overall number one when I first picked the device up it didn't feel that comfortable for starters it felt very angular and blocky especially along the edges right here when I tried to grip the device it just pressed against my palms and didn't feel very good not only that when you look at the back right here it does have some grips to it but there at a weird angle and just didn't really fit for what I was trying to do if I try to grip it like a steam deck controller you can see there's just a lot of open space right here it's just not a good fit and so it took me a bit but then I realized what I was doing wrong and then I was holding my wrist at the wrong angle instead of trying to grip it from a 90 degree angle like this like you would on a steam deck I realized that I needed to Pivot my wrist a little bit more Inward and the way I kind of wrapped my head around it is that I wanted to take the meat of my palm right here and then press it against the angled part of the controller here in the corners and so instead of trying to grip it like a steam deck or an Xbox controller like this I realized I needed to have a bit flatter of an angle overall and sure enough when I grab it like this and press the me to my Palms against the corners here yeah it feels very comfortable not only that everything seems to fall into place for example right here the two fingers are now lined up to the grip and these actually fit really well at this angle and we have a position for our middle finger above those two function buttons on the back so it was a bit of a learning curve just for me to train myself to hold it like this but after that I had had zero complaints in fact this is probably now the second most comfortable handheld PC that I own other than the steam deck and the major difference between those two is that this one feels just a little bit more flat overall here at this angle you can see that my fingers are more flush with the device than actually gripping it and so it will feel like you're holding a tablet as opposed to a controller but all the same it's perfectly comfortable by comparison the steam deck's just a little bit more naturally ergonomic in the fact that my hands just kind of wrap around those grips of course this does make the grips more pronounced and the device itself a lot bigger but all the same I did find the steam deck to be just more naturally comfortable than the Ally however I don't think that takes away from the fact that the Ally handheld device itself does feel very comfortable especially when I'm playing something like a first person shooter game where I need to access all the buttons in fact this is the kind of device that I would look forward to playing a first person shooter on and that's definitely not something I could say about a lot of other handheld PC so in a nutshell yes I'm a fan of the ergonomics of this device and really my only complaint about this whole setup is the local location and size of these function keys on the back I found that I was pressing these accidentally all the time and so because of that I would not recommend mapping these to a single key press for example I wouldn't recommend using the show desktop function because it's going to immediately take out of your game if you accidentally press it instead I think the secondary function where you have to press this and something else is probably going to be your better bet okay now let's look at the i o on the top to start we have a headphone jack on the left and then we have a micro SD card slot and this one I loaded up with a one terabyte card and I put all my games and ROMs on this and so this will be an easy way to expand your storage now to the right of that we have this big interface right here and this is actually a dual purpose interface on the right side of it right here is our USBC Port this is where you're going to charge the device or maybe use it for peripherals now the entirety of the interface is what they use to connect to their XG mobile platform and this here is an external GPU dock that is available for laptops as well as now this device in a couple notes Here There are two different models available right now and note here that these are mobile gpus they're not going to be as powerful as their desktop counterparts but all the same if you wanted to use this handheld for a desktop-like experience this is going to be your best bet and like I mentioned I plan on doing a video for this external GPU so be on the lookout for that either way you can use a USBC Port right here or the entire interface now for the rest of the top here we have our volume up and down buttons and then we have charging and power indicator LEDs and then finally we have our power button which is also a fingerprint sensor and then of course behind that we have our exhaust for the active cooling fans speaking of which that's what these two openings are right here this is actually a dual fan setup and it does a very good job of keeping the device cool but is also very quiet and I'm going to show more testing of that when I do my steam deck comparison video anyway that's about it when it comes to the hardware other than the screen which we'll talk about more when I actually turn the device on in the end I'm pretty impressed with the overall Hardware I don't really have any major complaints just a couple nitpicks here and there now let's do some size and weight comparisons against other similar handhelds to start we have the GPD win 4. this is using the ryzen 7 6800u chip which you will see in a lot of handheld here going forward and as you can see the Win 4 is a much more compact machine up next we have the ionio air plus this is the 6800u model so same chip as the Win 4 but it is a little bit bigger than that one and real quick is a palette cleanser right here here is the switch OLED so you can get a size comparison in case you have one of these at home up next we have the 1X player mini this one has the same chip as the others and this one's a little bit smaller than the Rog Ally and this one also has a taller aspect ratio this one is 16 by 10. same thing with the ine02 same chip as well as the 16x10 aspect ratio and you can see this one's just a little bit smaller than the Ally and quite a bit more rounded too and then finally we have the steam deck this one's obviously larger and of course we'll do a lot more size comparisons in my dedicated steam deck comparison video here later either way let's move over to wait the Ally is 612 grams that makes it quite a bit heavier than something like the Nintendo switch and it's also about 100 grams heavier than the Ionia air plus now the thing about the Rog Ally is that the weight is surprisingly low compared to the size for example it's about the same weight as the Win 4 as well as the 1X player mini even though these are smaller than the Rog Ally and it does weigh quite a bit less than the eye and e02 and it's also about 60 grams lighter than the steam deck all told I would say that the Rog Ally is a pretty large device but is lighter than you would think in terms of just general size I would say it's something you can definitely grip and walk around with but it's definitely not something that would fit into a pocket and is going to be a little bit unwieldy just to carry around and it is a similar experience when walking around carrying the steam deck this one's a little bit taller because of that 16 by 10 aspect ratio but yeah kind of the same thing here I guess the best way I can put it is that if you find that the seam deck is just a little bit too big then the Rog alley might be the perfect size for you now if you find the steam deck to be way too big you're probably going to find the rot Ally to be just a little bit too big okay now let's move over to the software side of things we're just going to boot it up right here so you can see the process and I'm going to leave my finger on the fingerprint sensor so that it'll unlock as soon as I get it started and as you can see here it takes about 17 seconds from boot to desktop and honestly for a Windows platform that's not too bad and now that we have the screen on let's go ahead and talk about it number one you can see that the bezels are larger on the top and bottom and the sides but overall I would say that the bezels aren't too bad on this device I also think that the colors are very accurate and it has a nice amount of saturation as well now let's test the brightness and dimness we'll start by going all the way down and as you can see it does get pretty dim let's go ahead and turn off the studio lights and I would say here it's a little bit brighter than I would like to be able to play in pitch black dark but all the same it's not too bad next let's try Outdoors this is at maximum brightness here in the shade and I would say at this level right here it's perfectly playable however in direct sunlight it is pretty dark I would say that this is not going to be a very good time so overall I would say it's a pretty good screen but it's not going to be exceptional in certain environments alright I think it's time to get into testing we're going to start with PC games and I'm just going to boot these directly from my steam interface obviously I could also boot them from the Armory crate but I found that all that really does is just open up steam and so I'm just going to go directly from here when it comes to PC games we're going to start with our easy to play ones and then move our way up from there and I'm going to try to do a few things here number one I'm going to try to play in silent mode which is the lower power profile and then also I want to try to play these at a 1080p resolution in the highest settings possible and then also because we have it I want to try out that 120 hertz refresh rate too and for many games this will work out pretty well you can use the lowest power profile to play some of these lightweight indie games but I have to be honest when I turn on 120 hertz I cannot tell the difference and that was something that surprised me because when I do play like say on my PS5 at 120 hertz I can definitely tell the difference but I think here with this smaller screen I really wasn't seeing it and honestly I wasn't really sure what I was expecting here but all the same I just didn't see the difference and as you start to move your way up you're probably going to have to adjust the power profile for example with cuphead I had to up upgrade it to the performance mode instead of Silent that means it's going to be about a 14 watt TDP and given the fact that I can't really tell a difference between 60 and 120 hertz on this screen for future play sessions I'm just going to drop this down to 60 frames per second and then use the lower power profile to save on battery life now an interesting thing here is Hades this one plays at performance mode 120 hertz no problem but if I try to drop it down to silent mode the lower power profile and actually doesn't even get to 60 frames per second and so for this one you actually want to use the performance mode power profile just to be able to get a full frame rate but if you look at the wattage up top you can see it's pushing it to the max we're getting about 20 21 Watts altogether and that's because these power profiles have a wide range of movement within them and so as you can see here at 120 hertz we're really pushing that power profile but if we drop it down to 60 frames per second we can get something much lower about 17 Watts altogether and so while we're using performance mode for both 60 and 120 hertz the 60 hertz will still have a lower power demand altogether now for the the next few games I want to show off different Power profiles and what you can expect in terms of performance from those so let's start here with Grand Theft Auto 5. we're going to be playing this in 720p with the normal or low settings and you can see here within performance mode we're getting somewhere around 95 100 frames per second now if we want to bump this up to turbo mode we can get 120 frames and Beyond and this is with vsync off and so that's why you're seeing these numbers all over the place but of course here with the turbo mode we're pushing it to a 30 watt TDP and that's going to drain the battery very fast considering we have a 40 watt hour battery and so really it's going to come down to you and how much time you have to play a game and whether or not you're close to a wall outlet for example if you played it in performance mode with a 60 frames per second cap you're going to get a very solid frame rate and this is going to be a pretty nice and smooth experience and as I'll show you in our battery testing this will give you about two hours of gameplay altogether however if you'd like you can drop it down to a 30 frame per second cap and then move it over to silent mode this is the lowest power profile and as you can see right here it's also running smooth and in terms of battery life you can expect something around three hours altogether and so like I said it's really going to come down to how much time you have and what you're willing to live with and the same thing is going to happen if you want to have a nice resolution for example with doom Eternal we're using 1080p in medium settings and in performance mode we're getting less than 60 frames per second and so you do have a couple options right here number one you could turn on turbo mode and that will give you well over 60 frames per second but of course this will run down your battery faster on the other side you could drop down the resolution so for example here we're going to go into performance mode with 720p medium settings and here we're getting over 60 frames per second as well and so for me personally what I did in this situation is just use 720p medium settings and then keep it on performance mode with a 60 frames per second cap and this was perfectly smooth and predictable and so I really enjoyed this experience here and it's going to be a similar story with other games for example here with Elden ring we can push it into turbo mode and you'll get an average of about 50 frames per second altogether and this does feel very smooth and even 720 AP and low settings still looks very good on this screen however if we use these same settings but in performance mode we will get about 40 frames per second and that's going to be about half the power demand of the turbo mode and so for me personally I don't think those additional 10 frames per second are really going to be worth it here's another example with Final Fantasy VII remake if we use 720p in low settings we can get 60 frames per second here in performance mode but if you'd like you can upgrade the resolution to 1080p with low settings and then still within performance mode we can set it to a 30 frame per second cap it's really going to come down to what you prefer which you rather have a higher graphic resolution or a higher frame rate either way the chip that we're seeing here in the Rog Ally does give us this choice and I did find that this chip performed really well considering the fact that it has integrated graphics for example I was trying to push 60 frames per second with Marvel Spider-Man and so I immediately went into turbo mode and sure enough yes this was a pretty smooth frame rate however that got me thinking and so I turned it down to Performance mode and here I found that I still had a pretty solid solid frame rate about 50 frames per second and that's way better than what you can get on the steam deck or any of the 6800u chipset devices generally this is a game that I would expect to play only at about 30 frames per second and so that is quite a big leap from what we had seen previously same thing with God of War this is a game that hovers between 30 and 40 frames per second depending on the TDP that you're using but here in performance mode we're getting an average of about 45 frames per second and so even without having to push it to the turbo mode we're still getting some really nice performance here in God of War it's a similar story with Destiny 2 this one's at 720p in low settings and generally I would have to play this at 30 or 40 frames per second and it's kind of hard to see in the footage right here but in the top right we're getting an average of about 55 frames per second and again this is without turning on Turbo Modes we're going to get about two hours of battery life altogether same thing with the Witcher 3 in performance mode here with 720p low settings we're getting about 60 frames per second it will dip down here and there especially if you try to walk through a town but all the same I would say this is very play playable and I showed this game off earlier when I was talking about the dock but here is Grid it's 720p low settings and performance mode we're getting an average of about 90 frames per second and as I showed in that other segment if we turn it onto turbo mode we will get 120. and really when it comes down to it I found myself choosing performance mode just about every single time I was picking a game to me this was a good balance between having some pretty good graphics and a high frame rate but then also about two hours of battery life and even though the TDP ranges are pretty broad here we only have three different options there are ways to manipulate it so that you can have a lower or higher power draw for example here with Horizon zero Dawn I have it at least 60 frames per second cap and you can see that the TDP is hovering around 19 or 20 watts now if we drop this down to a 40 frames per second cap you can see that the wattage will drop down between 15 and 14 instead and so even Within These TDP ranges you do have some room to work with Okay that's about it for my PC game testing I know there's more that I could do for example I could try out third-party tools but I really wanted to to see what the performance was going to be like out of the box and I would say that you can play just about every game with some good results depending on the power profile that you choose okay now let's move over to Retro Game emulation and I've got a couple notes right here number one the fact that we have a 1080p display means that scaling is going to look really good with pixel based games you can see that the life bar is very close to being perfectly balanced of course you could always turn on Integer scaling but for me I think this is good enough and that's one of the benefits of having a higher resolution display like this compared to the steam deck additionally another note is that 4x3 content like this right here will have these black bars on the side and these black bars are going to be wider than they would be on something like the steam Deck with the 16x10 aspect ratio regardless I think the bezels here are good enough for playing 4x3 content it's a little bit distracting but not too bad and of course wider aspect ratio systems like Game Boy Advance are going to look very good right here so I think when it comes to playing retro games this is perfectly fine and of course we have a lot of power to work with and so I'm going to set everything to the silent power profile and as you can see right here we're getting some really good gameplay so if you want to play some classic arcade titles like Killer Instinct you can totally do that here and of course you can play all the other retro systems so things like Sega Saturn will play just fine and even PSP upscaled to a 4X resolution or 1080p still runs at full speed even in silent mode moving up from there GameCube performance is also very good most of the games will be able to play at a 1080p resolution with still using that silent mode profile other games that are harder to play will probably have to use the performance profile like fcog X and same thing with Nintendo Wii I found that I used the performance profile right here because that would give me a more consistent 60 frames per second at a 3X resolution now I surprised to find that PS2 emulation was a little bit more performant than I was expecting in fact it was a little bit better than GameCube for example both Final Fantasy 10 and Dragon Quest 8 ran into the 3x or 1080p resolution while still using the lower power profile and surprisingly even God of War did that too now bear in mind that it really pushed that lower brand profile so we're seeing about 14 watts altogether but all the same it's pretty cool to be able to play 1080p with PS2 without having to go to even the middle power profile now moving over to PS3 I found that the performance mode actually worked the best here I could play games like Dead or Alive 5 or demon souls at full speed without having to tax the CPU too much for Ratchet and Clay quest for booty I found that performance mode wouldn't quite get me 60 frames per second but it was still very playable I'd say the average here was about 50 frames and still felt really good now for the more challenging open world environments like Prince of Persia right here I found that the performance mode was kind of all over the place I could get a solid 30 if I wanted to turn that on but I couldn't really get anything consistent above that now turning on turbo mode got me a little bit closer to 60 but really not that much and so it may be within the tools that we have right here you may not be able to get 60 frames per second however within the Armory crate settings you do have the ability to set a manual power profile and so something like PS3 May benefit from that kind of tweaking and of course you could always use a third-party tool but for me I found the best way to approach it was to just use performance mode and if I got a little bit of lag then I would kick it into turbo mode if I needed it either way I would say that PS3 is going to be very playable on this device okay Switching gears let's move over to Microsoft with the original Xbox and this one I found did not run very efficiently at all in fact just to get some of the harder to run games like Forza Motorsport or Panzer Dragoon orta to play at full speed I did have to turn it on to turbo mode in fact among all the things that I emulated this one was the hardest to get at full speed so maybe your best bet when it comes to playing original Xbox is to play this while plugged in because otherwise you'll probably only get about an hour or less of gameplay moving up from there let's try out Xbox 360 and this one actually plays at full speed in performance mode now I didn't try every single game but the few that I did worked really well the big issue here is going to come down to compatibility because this emulator doesn't really play everything now moving over to Nintendo another system that surprised me was Wii U for many games I I was able to use the lowest power profile and still get a full frame rate that included things like new Super Mario Brothers U as well as Legend of Zelda Wind Waker and so depending on what kind of game you're trying to play on Wii U you might get some pretty good battery life now for breath of the wild I found that performance mode was actually pretty good another similar handheld PCS you really have to crank things up but for this one here I'm getting well over 40 frames per second with a 15 watt TDP and so for this situation right here I would probably set it to a 40 frame per second cap and just be done with it and finally for my last system tested I wanted to show off Nintendo switch I'm only going to show one game here because the Nintendo ninjas have been very active lately either way what I wanted to show here is that Metroid primary Master plays very well even in docked mode with performance mode and so what this means to me is that basically any Nintendo switch game is going to be playable on this device there may be a few that you have to turn on turbo mode just to get a full frame rate but I think for the majority of them they'll work really well in performance mode and again we're talking about docked mode not handheld mode you can always turn into that if you wanted to as well okay before we start wrapping up let me show you the results of my battery life testing and the way I do this is a little bit unique and then I basically just play the games and I time how long it takes to run the battery down to start let's talk about charging I didn't actually measure it from 0 to 100 but I did find that at any given time if I plugged it in I could get about 50 charge in about 30 minutes so that leads me to believe that it's probably going to take about an hour hour and a half to charge it from zero to full I also found that the sleep mode battery drain was surprisingly good I left the device in sleep mode for 12 hours and I had a zero percent battery drain okay now let's start with the testing now I did two different versions of both silent mode and performance mode on the low end I emulated Paper Mario Thousand Year Door on the GameCube for this I set to the silent mode power profile with a 1080p upscale and as you can see I got a little bit less than three and a half hours now for steamworld Dig 2 I added the same power profile but I pushed it to 120 frames per second and you can see here I got about three hours a game gameplay altogether now moving over to Performance mode I tried the lower end of the spectrum with Horizon zero Dawn here I did 720p low settings but with a 40 frames per second cap and I got a little over two hours of gameplay now if I push performance mode to 720p low settings but with 60 frames per second here with Final Fantasy 7 remake I got 1 hour and 40 minutes and then finally I did test turbo mode here with Elden ring at 1080p with low settings that gave me an average frame rate about 50 frames per second but then the battery life was about an hour altogether so all told I would say this is about what I expected with a 40 watt hour battery and this is really just how things are when it comes to x86 handheld PCS if anything I would say I was a little bit disappointed with the low power profiles for example with the steam deck you can often push it to like five or six hours if you play something really lightweight but unfortunately here I found that about three and a half hours was the best I could squeeze out of the Rog Ally okay wrapping things up here let's go ahead and talk about what I like what I don't like about this device and honestly I think think there's a lot to like number one I think the overall quality here is very good the plastic feels good all of the components are pretty well built and you can also tell that they spend a lot of time designing their ergonomics this is a very comfortable handheld it's a little bit less comfortable than the steam deck but not by much I also found that no matter how hard I push this device it remained very cool and quiet and so if you're a little bit annoyed by the jet engine sound that you can find in other mini PCS you might be pleasantly surprised and I'll do more testing of this when I actually compare it against the steam deck in a future video I also like the quality of the screen not only are the colors nice and vibrant but they're very accurate and when you do play games in 1080P they look very sharp however that being said playing most games in 720p still looks very good additionally I think the device sounds good not only do we have nice front-facing speakers but they have a good balance overall and probably the biggest thing here is the price to Performance I personally was expecting the high-end device to be about a thousand dollars so I was very surprised to find that it was only 700. now of course like all things this is not perfect so let's talk about what I don't like about the Rog Ally number one I think here is going to be the battery life and honestly it's not any worse than any other handheld PC but I found because I enjoy playing this so much I was disappointed when the battery would drain because I wanted to keep playing and so it's one of those things where the device is so good and playable that the battery life becomes more apparent I also found there were quite a few software bugs related to the command center now of course this is a brand new device and this is a test version at that and so I hope some of these things will get fixed in the future but as it stands when you're in a game and you try to change the power profile or the resolution it can get pretty buggy I also felt that the power profiles were a little bit limited there are only three default power profiles and while you do have a manual option it's not very easy to get to and of course there are third-party Solutions that'll allow you to tweak things as much as you'd like but I think that Asus is really trying to sell this as a first Party Machine and so I do hope that they improve their software to the point where you have a little bit more granularity when it comes to these profiles additionally I found that I didn't really have a use for the 120 hertz mode I do appreciate the fact that the screen has a 120 hertz refresh rate because that does make it very easy to break it down to 30 40 or 60 hertz but all the same I just didn't find myself playing any game at 120 frames per second and then finally again this isn't a dig on the device but it is running Windows and windows is Windows for example sleep mode is kind of buggy I don't think it has to do with the software it's just Windows altogether so there would be times when the sleep mode would actually power the device off or sometimes it would just decide to turn itself on and that was always kind of weird and while there are some great things about Windows for example the ability to use Game Pass the overall experience still isn't as seamless as using something like Steam OS in the end I found myself pleasantly surprised by the Asus Rog Ally when I first saw the announcement I was a little bit lukewarm about the idea but actually having it in my hands has made me a fan and I think they did a very good job at having it reasonably priced before today hands down the steam deck was the best thing you could buy for the money but here we are with a handheld PC that has much better performance and a better screen while still being within 50 of the high-end steam deck and so here's the way I'm thinking about it if you have a steam deck and you're happy with it I don't really think it's worth the upgrade to get this one too however if you do own a steam deck and you wish it had a little bit better performance or screen or it's a little bit too big for you then I think the Rog Ally might be worth considering and then finally if you don't have a steam deck but you're interested in getting one I think that the Rog Ally might be worth your consideration as well to sum it up I would say that the only reason that the Rog Ally exists and at this price is because of the steam deck however if we were in a world without the steam deck then this would be the handheld PC to get and even then with the steam deck being readily available I think this is still a very good handheld I'm personally not at the point where I'm going to sell my steam deck because this is the one for me but all the same it does have me second guessing the fact that I have a GPD win 4. up until now this was the other hand LPC that I thought was a great alternative to the steam deck and you might be wondering how I still have this device because I was supposed to give it to a developer well it's a long story but that guy ghosted me so either way I do still have the GPD win 4. and honestly I think the Rog Ally has kind of replaced this one for me I still love the slide out keyboard and the optical Mouse thing but all the same the Rog Ally is quite a bit more comfortable to hold so if anything I would say that the Rog alley is yet another handheld that I can recommend it's really going to come down to whatever factors are most important to you and what's within your budget either way I think if you pick this one here you're going to have a great time so let me know what you think in the comments below and as always thank you for watching be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 388,107

Keywords:

Id: 7-WlPA8acro

Length: 39min 21sec (2361 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/daveMUFC]

Really good to get some emulation feedback and real world battery benchmarks.

Actually got me interested again with the Switch emulation + GC/Wii able to run on the silent profile...

I'm also not fussed about high resolution and fps if I can save battery, so something like Paper Mario at 720p could potentially reach nearly 4 hours.

[u/Corner_Huge]

Why does everyone ignore the fact that windows 11 means you can just add a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and all of a sudden you have a full computer and not just a game console???????????????

everyone hates on windows because it's inefficient and stuff and yes that is true.....but that's also what makes this a lot more viable for so many more normies. I would have 100% bought them steam deck if it could do more than just game.......It's an amazing platform but if all it can do is game then it's just not worth it for me.

The rog ally will have problems 100% and it's not perfect, but man it's the best steam deck for normies and I all for it!

[u/Hollywood-emotive]

Is it possible to get a really long charging cable and play 90% of the time plugged in (while in bed/on the couch etc.). Are there limitations with longer charging cables?

The reason I ask: I travel quite a bit but I don’t see myself playing, on a plane for instance, for more than 2 hours without a plug point nearby.

[u/kevenzz]

Buttons getting stuck is a major flaw.

[u/PryingOpenMyThirdPie]

Battery life complaints are weird to me. Doesn't everyone have a brick at this point that supports this wattage?

[u/rynsic]

What about mmos like gw2